Avaya is a leading provider of solutions that enable customer and team engagement across multiple channels and devices for better customer experience, increased productivity and enhanced financial performance. Its world-class contact center and unified communications technologies and services are available in a wide variety of flexible on-premise and cloud deployment options that seamlessly integrate with non-Avaya applications. The Avaya Engagement Environment enables third parties to create and customize business applications for competitive advantage. Avaya’s fabric-based networking solutions help simplify and accelerate the deployment of business critical applications and services. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com.

Untethered

How’s your cellphone coverage indoors? Unpredictable? If you’re ahead of the game, you’ve downloaded a WiFi app so you can make calls over your Wireless LAN from the coffee shop. The trouble is that when you leave the building, you can’t take that WiFi call with you. “Hold on“, you’ll say, “I’ll call you back when I get to the car“. (No, I haven’t been monitoring your calls. Just guessing).

Now, with Avaya’s latest software, (for iPhone: Click Here) you can continue that conversation uninterrupted into the car and back again. .

I’ll start with some old news: With Avaya’s “EC500 Service”, any time someone calls your office number, your Enterprise Communications server can extend your office calls to your cellphone. This isn’t just “Call Forwarding”. In Call Forwarding. With EC500, the Enterprise Server is still involved. Even though the call was offered to your mobile device, Avaya Aura is managing the media just as it would to your desk phone. So, for example, your assistant can be bridged onto the session, and the call is tracked on your Enterprise Call Logs just as any call to your desk.

But, as I said, this isn’t new. That patent was filed over 10 years ago and was selected for New Jersey’s prestigious Thomas Edison award in 2011. That invention was a major advance in the area of fixed-mobile convergence at a time when the industry was still struggling to define what fixed-mobile convergence meant.

Avaya offers this through our Avaya One-X Mobile Lite application on several kinds of smartphones, including an iPhone version. There’s nothing for the user to administer, and no extra server licensing. Our servers allow this feature inherently through the architecture design of separating Media from signaling.

But I’m not going to give you the link for it, because we’ve just one-upped ourselves.

Avaya’s One-X Mobile 6.2 SIP phone is available now on the AppStore (https://itunes.apple.com/app/id648036589). Sure, it has that EC500 Extend to Mobile feature, but it’s now combined with a full set of network convergence services. Users who want to bring their own device are looking for a complementary rich SIP phone service and – most important – the ability to hand off calls across networks.

So, for example, if your phone is on a WiFi network in the coffee shop or in your office, you can make and receive calls with our app just as if it was your business phone including secure enterprise management. The phone uses the data network to interact with your Enterprise server using SIP and VoIP. Then, when you go mobile and will be leaving the coffee shop, you still want the call to stay alive and continue to be treated as a Business call. When you get to your office and want to continue this on your desk phone, you’ll see the call active on a line appearance, and you can select to join. One of the tricks to solve on the iPhone is setting up the media path for a WiFi call while a cellular call is already active. This portability becomes possible with the marriage of a SIP app with EC500. You leave the coffee shop, and now the call is carried by the Cellular network. Same call. Same Enterprise controls. If you, for example, bill by the minute (yeah, this would be for Lawyers), your billing system would still retain the details about the session as you moved across networks.

Even the reverse works. If you’re on one of these EC500 cellular calls and you walk into the Office, the phone recognizes the WiFi connectivity and with a touch of the screen, you can just continue on with the same conversation on the smartphone app.

Two way handoff from WiFi to Cellular and back. For Avaya, it’s not a super new high tech risky strange untrackable protocol design. It’s a marriage of EC500 with SIP. This is core to our fundamental Enterprise Architecture design and shows the power of good design.

Avaya is a leading provider of solutions that enable customer and team engagement across multiple channels and devices for better customer experience, increased productivity and enhanced financial performance. Its world-class contact center and unified communications technologies and services are available in a wide variety of flexible on-premise and cloud deployment options that seamlessly integrate with non-Avaya applications. The Avaya Engagement Environment enables third parties to create and customize business applications for competitive advantage. Avaya’s fabric-based networking solutions help simplify and accelerate the deployment of business critical applications and services. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com.